But for marketers, who now face a sea of competing content and little to no unpaid reach, social networks are simply no longer the most effective way to reach those consumers.

So a growing number of marketers are beginning to rethink social networks, and many are driving traffic to their own websites and mobile apps instead.

Bringing your audience home has huge advantages. Consumers who want to stay in touch with your brand are nearly three times more likely to visit your website than to engage with you on Facebook. And the more time a consumer spends on your properties—whether shopping, discovering, or researching products—translates into a longer, stronger relationship between that consumer and your brand, according to a study from Kantar Media.

So how do you make your own properties as captivating as a social network? Here are four ways they do it, and how you can, too…

So make your website a consumer destination for content—not just about your brand but about anything relevant to your audience. You don’t have to write it all yourself. Supplement your original content with curated content from experts and customers.

2. If it’s not real time, then it’s stale

Part of what makes social networks so addicting is the constant flow of fresh content. We can’t predict what will be in our feeds the next time we log in, so we’re constantly tempted to log in and see what’s new.

If your website and mobile app always look the same, your audience has no reason to come back.

People are talking about your brand in real time already, and if your fans see your site as a real-time destination, they’ll come straight to you for the latest updates. So integrate real-time content across your website, marketing, and advertising campaigns.

Your entire homepage doesn’t need to showcase every tweet and Vine video about your brand, but you should have at least some content that updates in real time.

3. Don’t just give them something to look at, give them something to do

Strangely, one of the most basic elements of social networks remains one of the most prominent features that sets them apart: engagement. When you’re browsing Facebook or Pinterest, you don’t just look at content—you actually interact with it by sharing, liking, commenting, favoriting, etc.

Social networks don’t have a patent on that technology. You can invest in engagement apps on your own properties. Things like polls, reviews, comments, and chats allow visitors to engage with your site the same way they would a social network. And social apps like media walls and trending widgets pull UGC (user-generated content) from social networks and give fans a way to interact with it directly from your site.

In fact, 88% of companies that implemented real-time, social applications onto their sites increased user engagement as a result, a Livefyre study found.